PENELOPE Mortimer, who has written 11 novels, a bitchy biography of the Queen Mother, two volumes of autobiography, had six children by four men, been sexually abused by her father, attempted suicide and had lung cancer, is frightened she’ll be remembered only as the ex-wife of the creator of Rumpole, that “Ex-Wife of John Mortimer” may be engraved on her tombstone. And she resents that.

On the phone Penelope has been fierce and lugubrious. So it’s a surprise to meet a trendy 76-year-old in jeans, cardigan and cowboy boots, smoking with teenage fervour and chuckling with throaty disdain in her semi in Cricklewood.

And to find a cheerful house with conservatory, brochure for a red Mazda sports car she yearns to buy, grandchildren’s toys, and a garden (her passion) which she opens to the public.

Is Penelope going to be like Rebecca in her novel The Handyman? ‘That’s the only time I’ve ever described myself,’ she says. Penelope, who is thin and has a timorous face, pauses. ‘She’s anti-social, impatient, intolerant, always has black fingernails and grubby jeans, is impossible to live with, and a bad mother with a heart of pure mush.’ Her timidity is apparent when she speaks, her humour a defence.

Penelope contracted lung cancer in 1992. She says sardonically that she’s had ‘only half’ a lung removed. ‘I was useless for months. I just sat and felt sorry for myself. I kept hearing a little voice saying, ‘Of course she was never the same after that …” She started smoking heroically again four months later.

Does she fear death? ‘Not in the slightest, no, I’m rather in favour of it.’ But she fears dying. ‘One dreads the relentlessness of getting older and going gaga.”

Her father was an eccentric parson who lost his faith and once wrote for the parish magazine in defence of the Soviet persecution of the Church. And her faith? ‘I have no conventional religious faith. Just a sort of nudging feeling that there is more than is known.’

We talk about the second volume of her autobiography, About Time Too. ‘Now before we begin, don’t concentrate on my marriage.’ She gags, mockingly. The book is exquisitely well written and sometimes horribly witty, but doesn’t help people forget her 23-year marriage.

In it Mortimer emerges as heartless and compulsively unfaithful, regarding his wife’s grief over his infidelities with dispassionate bewilderment. It came out in hardback a year ago and she sent John a copy. She has heard nothing back. ‘If John doesn’t like something, he pretends it doesn’t exist.’ Does she regret having written it? ‘Sometimes.’ It is searingly honest and she felt exposed.

SHE writes about giving birth without chloroform in a storm. ‘I got it into my head that I would give birth without anaesthetic. It was very unpleasant.’ She chronicles having an abortion and being sterilised. ‘At the time I felt hopeful. Only the circumstances afterwards (that John had been having an affair while she was pregnant) made it seem a mistake.’ She records her overdose suicide attempt. ‘Why do people try to commit suicide? Do they really? Or is it just a big gesture?’ she says, with a smoky cough. ‘Insofar as I understood what I was doing I wanted to kill myself. I was out of my mind. I didn’t think of anything except how miserable I was and there seemed to be no alternative.’

She would have left six children. ‘That’s what is so difficult to understand now. At the time nothing occurred to me except that I couldn’t go on.’ She felt ‘ashamed’ when she awoke in hospital.

She had ECT. ‘I can find nothing in favour of it.’ Her voice rises. ‘My attitude to life can’t be altered by a few electric shocks or pills.’ And she documents her visits to psychiatrists. Was that helpful? ‘It was someone to talk to.’

Penelope is an obsessive. She writes even of John as an ‘addiction’. ‘Everything I do, I do obsessively. If I’m working, I work 14 hours a day. If I’m gardening, I garden 14 hours a day.’ How does she account for her compulsive personality? ‘God knows. Running away from unhappiness? Running to what you think of as happiness? I think it’s to do with fear. Fear that if you let up for one minute, the whole thing will disintegrate.’ There is a poignant description in the book of when she was on a US publicity tour: ‘I sat on my bed for most of the night, more frightened than I had ever been in my life.’

HAS she ever thought she was mad? ‘Once or twice it has occurred to me. I don’t really know what that means. I suppose doolally, going berserk, talking gibberish, bedlam mad. Sometimes I think I’m going round the twist.’ She writes to keep her sanity. ‘Well, a different sort of lunacy.’ Her difficulties stem from a fraught childhood. She was sent to seven different schools. ‘I never got further than fractions!’ And she had a mother whose only maternal feelings were expressed in a belief in regular meals and ghosts. ‘She was incredibly damaging, but with the best possible motives. She took my life over.’

Her mother was frigid and her father transferred his sexual attentions to Penelope. ‘Until recently I scoffed at the idea of it having affected me emotionally more than just feeling contempt.’ When she was 17, her father attempted to rape her. ‘He clumsily tried that once. Otherwise it was just messing around and petting.

“It wasn’t so much what he did, which is what any dirty old man will do, it was the shame he felt that really affected me. I mean I knew Daddy shouldn’t do this, so I despised him, which later made me always look out for the weakness in men and feel contempt for them.’

She told ‘maybe a couple’ of schoolfriends. Did she feel it was her fault? ‘Certainly not. All the time I was a child it wasn’t my fault. Maybe the last occasion, when I was about 16, it was my fault. I think it probably was. By that time I knew what he was after and my behaviour was, as it was to every man in those days, flirty. Maybe he took that as … I don’t know …’